“I’ll bet I could get in to see him,” Rainbird said, as if this idea had just occurred to him.
“You could? You really think you could?”
“I could change with Herbie someday. See him. Tell him you’re okay. Well, not tell him but pass him a note or something” “Oh, wouldn’t that be dangerous?” “It would be dangerous to make a business of it, kid. But I owe you one. I’ll see how he is.”
She threw her arms around him in the dark and kissed him. Rainbird gave her an affectionate hug. In his own way, he loved her, now more than ever. She was his now, and he supposed he was hers. For a while.
They sat together, not talking much, and Charlie dozed. Then he said something that woke her up as suddenly as completely as a dash of cold water in the face.
“Shit, you ought to light their damn fires, if you can do it.”
Charlie sucked her breath in, shocked, as if he had suddenly hit her.
“I told you,” she said. “It’s like letting a… a wild animal out of a cage. I promised myself I’d never do it again. That soldier at the airport… and those men at that farm… I killed them… burned them up!” Her face was hot, burning, and she was on the verge of tears again.
“The way you told it, it sounded like selfdefense.”
“Yes, but that’s no excuse to-”
“It also sounded like maybe you saved your old man’s life.”
Silence from Charlie. But he could feel trouble and confusion and misery coming of her in waves. He hastened on, not wanting her to remember right now that she had come very close to killing her father as well.
“As for that guy Hockstetter, I’ve seen him around. I saw guys like him in the war. Every one of them a ninety-day wonder, King Shit of Turd Mountain. If he can’t get what he wants from you one way, he’ll try some other way.”
“That’s what scares me the most,” she admitted in a low voice.
“Besides, there’s one guy who could use a hotfoot.”
Charlie was shocked, but giggled hard-the way a dirty joke could sometimes make her laugh harder just because it was so bad to tell them. When she was over her giggles, she said: “No, I won’t light fires, I promised myself. It’s bad and I won’t.”
It was enough. It was time to stop. He felt that he could keep going on pure intuition, but he recognized that it might be a false feeling. He was tired now. Working on the girl had been every bit as exhausting as working on one of Rammaden’s safes.
It would be too easy to go on and make a mistake that could never be undone.
“Yeah, okay. I guess you’re right.”
“You really will see my dad?”
“I’ll try, kid.”
“I’m sorry you got stuck in here with me, John. But I’m awful glad, too.”
“Yeah.”
They talked of inconsequential things, and she put her head on his arm. He felt that she was dozing ofd” again-it was very late now-and when the lights went on about forty minutes later, she was fast asleep. The light in her face made her stir and turn her head into his darkness. He looked down thoughtfully at the slender willow stem of her neck, the tender curve of her skull. So much power in that small, delicate cradle of bone. Could it be true? His mind still rejected it, but his heart felt it was so. It was a strange and somehow wonderful feeling to find himself so divided. His heart felt it was true to an extent they wouldn’t believe, true perhaps to the extent of that mad Wanless’s ravings.
He picked her up, carried her to her bed, and slipped her between the sheets. As he pulled them up to her chin, she stired half awake.
He leaned over impulsively and kissed her. “Goodnight, kid.”
“Goodnight, Daddy,” she said in a thick, sleeping voice. Then she rolled over and became still.
He looked down at her for several minutes longer, then went back into the living room. Hockstetter himself came bustling in ten minutes later. “Power failure,” he said. “Storm. Dam electronic locks, all jammed. Is she-”
“She’ll be fine if you keep your goddam voice down,” Rainbird said in a low voice. His huge hands pistoned out, caught Hockstetter by the lapels of his white lab coat, and jerked him forward, so that Hockstetter’s suddenly terrified face was less than an inch from his own. “And if you ever behave as if you know me in here again, if you ever behave toward me as if I am anything but a D-clearance orderly, I’ll kill you, and then I’ll cut you into pieces, and Cuisinart you, and turn you into catmeat.”
Hockstetter spluttered impotently. Spit bubbled at the corner of his lips.
“Do you understand? I’ll kill you.” He shook Hockstetter twice.
“I-I-I un-un-understand.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Rainbird said, and shoved Hockstetter, pale and wideeyed, out into the corridor.
He took one last look around and then wheeled his cart out and closed the selflocking door behind him. In the bedroom, Charlie slept on, more peacefully than she had in months. Perhaps years.
SMALL FIRES, BIG BROTHER
1
The violent storm passed. Time passed three weeks of it. Summer, humid and over bearing, still held sway over eastern Virginia, but school was back in session and lumbering yellow school buses trundled up and down the well-kept rural roads in the Longmont area. In not-too-distant Washington, D.C… another year of legislation, rumor, and innuendo was beginning, marked with the usual freak-show atmosphere engendered by national television, planned information leaks, and overmastering clouds of bourbon fumes.
None of that made much of an impression in the cool, environmentally controlled rooms of the two antebellum houses and the corridors and levels honeycombed beneath. The only correlative might have been that Charlie McGee was also going to school. It was Hockstetter’s idea that she be tutored, and Charlie had balked, but John Rainbird had talked her into it.
“What hurt’s it gonna do?” he asked. “There’s no sense in a smart girl like you getting way behind.
Shit-excuse me, Charlie-but I wish to God sometimes that I had more than an eighth-grade education. I wouldn’t be moppin floors now-you can bet your boots on that. Besides, it’ll pass the time.”
So she had done it-for John. The tutors came: the young man who taught English, the older woman who taught mathematics, the younger woman with the thick glasses who began to teach her French, the man in the wheelchair who taught science. She listened to them, and she supposed she learned, but she had done it for John.
On three occasions John had risked his job to pass her father notes, and she felt guilty about that and hence was more willing to do what she thought would please John. And he had brought her news of her dad-that he was well, that he was relieved to know Charlie was well too, and that he was cooperating with their tests. This had distressed her a little, but she was now old enough to understand-a little bit, anyway-that what was best for her might not always be best for her father. And lately she had begun to wonder more and more if John might know best about what was right for her. In his earnest, funny way (he was always swearing and then apologizing for it, which made her giggle), he was very persuasive.
He had not said anything about making fires for almost ten days after the blackout. Whenever they talked of these things, they did it in the kitchen, where he said there were no “bugs,” and they always talked in low voices.
On that day he had said, “You thought any more about that fire business, Charlie?” He always called her Charlie now instead of “kid.” She had asked him to.
She began to tremble. Just thinking about making fires had this effect on her since the Manders farm. She got cold and tense and trembly; on Hockstetter’s reports this was called a “mild phobic reaction.”
“I told you,” she said. “I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”
“Now, can’t and won’t aren’t the same thing,” John said. He was washing the floor-